Banners & Design

So far my banners has been using the theme of "sunset", which is synonymous to the blog's title, "one minute of dusk". The title was supposed to be my style of blogging, which would be short, quick posts that are easy to digest; hence one minute of "me". Although I never really adopted that style in the end, I thought the title was pretty cool, since it also refers to the brief, but beautiful moment right before the day transits into the night.

Well, I guess it's obvious that the idea come the ED of Bakemonogatari. It was so easy to duplicate the effect that many homemade versions of that ED came up on youtube. Anyway, all I did was create ten images of that subscribe button by tracing over one another, and gif-ing it with 0.1 seconds per pic. If I had time, I'll add in a girl (possible future site mascot) holding a sign.

Batch 2 Banners:


Suisei no Gargantia banner, featuring Amy.


Aria banner, featuring Akari. Still one of my most beloved titles after so many years.


Miku banner, from one of my favourite artist Wokada.


K-ON! banner, artist unknown.


Touhou banner, featuring Kochiya Sanae in front and Yasaka Kanako. No photoshopping done for this one... got really lazy with the last banner of the batch.

Batch 1 Banners:


The first banner I used, before I put the others up for rotation. It's the same one used by Marow. I liked the slightly dark feeling that Aika and Alice gives off in the back, while Akari stands in the foreground, but to a side, which give the opposite effect of a "character in focus". The contrast is strengthened, and the sky is darkened towards the right.


This is actually hard to crop. I needed the width, but Konata and Kagami's height are different and I need enough body to show they are running. I can't rotate, because the beach styled background would look weird. In the end, I adjusted the text for all five banners so I could slip Kagami behind it, putting her out of focus, and keeping Konata's full face and make her the main character. I shoulda highlighted Konata a bit more. The pic is darkened a lot.


This is pretty easy, but I never managed to get Miku's full face into the pic without losing the flowing hair effect. If the face looks funky to you, it's because the pic is left/right inverted. You might not know it, but a lot of anime pics can only look correct in one direction, particularly those that had a lot of shading.


You might not know it, but this one is difficult to get right. I need to keep the lighthouse and ship in view to have the "horizon" effect, but I also need enough height of the characters so that I would lose the impression that Haruko and Misuzu are holding hands. I believed that parts of the pic are rotated in the end.


This one was done really fast. It was the opposite effect of the Aria one; Marisa is the focused character, but in the background and above the text. I rotated enough to cut off the left eye of the foreground character, Reimu, so as not to be so directly with her identity. I got the effect I wanted, but the background it a bit too simple for my liking.

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